PPL Lesson #7: Stalls and stall recovery

I ended up cancelling my first lesson back after vacation as I was completely cream crackered, but I had a lesson booked a few days later so managed to get up in the air today for another enjoyable and (mostly) successful lesson.

With stalls on the menu I’d been keeping a close eye on the cloud levels today and was almost certain we were going to end up with a wx cancellation (or some early circuit practice) but after a quick chat with my instructor we decided to give it a go. It did mean that we had to pick our way around the lower-level clouds to find pockets of space just about big enough for me to get in a HASELL check (with clouds looming ever larger), do a 180 and enter and recover the stall, which I found quite thrilling but definitely not something I’d do without an instructor in the right hand seat.

We’d covered stall recovery without power in the previous lesson, so went straight into Standard Stall Recovery practice in power-idle clean, approach and landing configurations. Aside from needing to voice “roll wings level” even if that step isn’t necessary for a particular situation, my instructor seemed happy and I was able to recover with only a ~50ft height loss for each, so went into power-on stalls with high (-ly misplaced) confidence.

It might have been the cloud (in the manoeuvre we were climbing towards the cloud ceiling with low-level clouds around us, which was a bit disorientating) or it might have been the lingering fatigue from yesterday, but I didn’t find this one as straightforward as recovering from the power-idle stalls. On my first attempt we came pretty close to entering a spin as I was late on recovery and also forgot to take power all the way off before releasing the backpressure, but somehow I instinctively saved it with some opposite rudder and eventually getting the power off. Second attempt was much better and my instructor chalked it up as successful, but I think I’ll ask to revisit these as I can definitely tighten up the recovery.

Since I’d nearly spun the aircraft, and since spin recovery is the topic for next lesson, we ended with my instructor demonstrating a fully-developed spin and recovery. Honestly, this tied my stomach in knots. Remind me not to eat… well… anything before my next lesson :)

Other notable points for today were:

• requesting (and receiving) my first basic service from Farnborough Radar. I flubbed the position, but thankfully got the rest right enough that I avoided being reprimanded for gross incompetence by ATC. I doubled down in my mistake on changing back to Blackbushe by asking “G-BZEB request frequency change to Farnborough on 122.305”, and got a friendly if appropriately emphasised “G-EB frequency change approved. Squawk conspicuity and freecall Blackbushe on 122.305” in response. Need more practice :)
• first crosswind takeoff and landing. Crabbing in and then correcting with rudder at the last minute adds a whole new thing to occupy my already overloaded brain on final, though I got it down safely (if a little robustly).

Another 55m of dual flight time logged today, or a running total of 6h22m.

No lesson next week as my instructor is away, but I have booked my Air Law, Operational Procedures and Human Performance exams for next Friday. Revision via a combination of the Pooley’s books and Easy PPL has been going well and in the mocks I’m at ~90% across all three so hopefully a bit of additional revision between now and then will see me right.